Belt Sanders Rule

Yesterday was the International Belt Sander Drag Race, last held in Point Roberts maybe 8 years ago. Belt Sander Drag Racing was invented or created or brought to life here in Point Roberts, by Lorne Neilson who owns Neilson’s Hardware. The point is for belt sanders of any make or model, decorated or not, improved upon or out-of-the-box, to race each other in pairs down parallel tracks about 30 feet long. And eventually, the fastest belt sander wins something. But it’s really about the race more than the winning.

Sunday dawned clear and warm and by the time we got to the parking lot at the hardware store, the bleachers were almost full. A very nice gentleman offered me his bent knee to stand on so I could climb up to the higher seats from the side, and thereby get a better view of the races. (It felt a little like Elizabethan England: if it had been raining, would he have thrown his cloak down for me to walk on? In any case, my virtual thanks to him for his kindness and his willingness to risk injury to himself to allow me to have an improved view.)

Ed was designated the photographer of the day because he’s better at shooting than I am, and this was likely to be more difficult because the sanders were moving. So thanks to him, too, for the pictures.

This is the only event in Point Roberts that we have ever had to think about where would we park. Parking is never a problem here and it wasn’t a problem today, either, but we did have to drive around the block to get a place that wasn’t already parked in when you approached the store directly. Inside the ‘arena’ (which is to say the parking lot), there were maybe 250-300 people already eagerly cheering on the sanders. Also, the Fire Department was selling hot dogs.

By the end of the first set of races, a beautifully costumed belt sander named ‘Yellow Submarine” simply wiped out ‘The Grit Reaper’ and “Wall-E’ and a really funny cat with a mouse bouncing in front of its nose to win first place. Second went, surprisingly to ‘Rule Brittania,’ a very conservatively costumed sander with inflated balloons of red/white/blue, though the blue balloon was not inflated. Now, in my science education (which wasn’t actually all that good), I was more or less taught that if you put inflated balloons on a belt sander and then tried to race it against other belt sanders without inflated balloons, you would lose. And you would lose because the balloons would provide a drag/resistance on your race to the finish line. Although, my science teacher never actually mentioned belt sanders, but nevertheless. So maybe I learned the wrong science, or maybe science has changed, or maybe ‘Rule Brittania’ would have soared into first place at an amazing speed if only it had dropped the balloons.

This is the silliest racing competition I have ever seen. It gladdens my heart to see people taking competition a little less seriously than is the custom. But why don’t they also have a category for costumed sanders that don't race, but just stand and look very, very beautiful? Or maybe sand something delicately, while still looking very, very beautiful? Maybe next year.

No Clicks Without Bricks

Today’s post is primarily from Shelly Albaum who explains what he meant when he told me that a web site would not be sufficient to create community communication because ‘no clicks without bricks.’

"The research shows that most people do not regularly visit very many websites. They have dozens or scores of bookmarks, and they could check them all regularly, and a few people do, but the vast majority have only a few well-traveled paths -- less than 10 sites visited weekly -- and people are resistant to change. For example, just knowing that a great website is out there, or a better search engine than Google is out there, has almost no impact on my actual behavior.

That's because I don't have a real problem with Google, and information overload is such a serious problem for most people that news of a new website isn't really all that welcome. Or at least it's not particularly good news.

So creating the website that has all the information about Point Roberts is critically important, and is a must-do, important step. However, 95% of your intended audience won't remember to go there, and thus they will not hear the news. RSS was supposed to solve this by pushing the information out to your customized Yahoo Portal Page or your iGoogle Page, or your iPod, or your cell phone, but that still doesn't reach most people.

In the physical world, we have many more well-worn paths and thus are way better at receiving serendipitous information from our peripheral vision. That's why the big sign at the main intersection is so helpful.

What you'd want ideally is a big comfortable public space with great seating, occasional entertainment, lots of displays and bulletin boards, great drinks, cheap food, and convenience services like photocopies, faxes, or whatever people need. This would be a meeting place that everyone would have occasion to visit daily, or at least regularly, and would encounter visual reminders of interesting things, and then they would check the website to find out more. In its most fully articulated version, this idea would actually bring blogs and web sites into the physical world with large screens and plenty of free browsing terminals.

This kind of thing would have a different personality in every town, but every town needs something like it. Almost no town has one, though, I think. The main thing is to create a common public meeting space that is analogous to and complementary of the virtual town square that is a web page."

The Point Roberts Community Center comes immediately to my mind. It isn’t what Shelly describes, but it is extraordinarily easy to imagine it being that. I can see where we are; I can see where we can end up; but I can’t at all see what are the steps in between. I suppose that’s why ‘almost no town has one.’ More to think on.

Institution-less in Gaza

And maybe eyeless as well. I got an email the other day from a sometime Point Roberts visitor and relative of locals who is putting up a new web site in hopes that it will help to address Point Roberts’ residents’difficulties in creating some kind of community voice both for dealing with the community and for all kinds of other purposes, as well. So, I’ve been thinking today, having witnessed some of that broken-ness yesterday at the 4th of July parade, about why Point Roberts is so fractured. Things work for awhile, and then--all too frequently--they suddenly fly apart. Maybe it's not 'too frequently' but inevitably.

There are all the obvious reasons for the fracturedness and fractiousness of the Point community: lots of full time residents who don’t actually live here full-time; more Canadians than Americans who own property, but more Americans than Canadians who can vote; the border (which could itself be reasons numbers one through ten); a substantial portion of community members who are retired and thus less concerned pragmatically about the issues that affect younger people (jobs/economy) and younger people with children (schools, recreation). When the old people want some recreation, they take a cruise.

Other reasons are possible, but I don’t have any data to confirm them. However (never to be stopped by the absence of data), I strongly suspect that there are a lot of people who came here just because it was a kind of outpost where they weren’t going to be put upon by other people and weren’t going to be badgered into being members of a community. Voting patterns here suggest a hardy band of libertarians and they are bound to come in conflict with that other resident group of former hippies who are happy to have everybody in the soup together.

There are plenty of reasons why community doesn’t really work here. But I think the biggest one may be that we are a community without community institutions. We have a community health clinic, and a community library, and a community center and a community church. None of those institutions is set up to in any way create a sense of community beyond their narrow focus. Kris and staff run a great little library; Virginia and staff run a much needed health clinic; the community center itself is just a building, really, for events that somebody else has to figure out. The church is as ecumenical as a Lutheran church can possibly be, but it has worked hard to broaden its reach without substantial success, although the new minister is working hard to bring more people into the church for non-religion-specific events. But there’s nothing else: the newspaper, once a month, just isn’t enough, or often enough, to provide that center point.

In a brief conversation with my son (a web publishing/internet maven) about the possibility of a website as a community institution, he replied cryptically to me, ‘No clicks without bricks. You need a pub.’ I’m looking forward to hearing more from him on the topic, but I have so far figured out that he’s saying a website won’t work if it doesn’t also have some kind of physical community presence. I’ve looked at a few previous local website attempts, and they certainly don’t seem to have generated that conversational focus on their web basis alone.

So, we need a pub; I don’t think he meant a bar, though, because there are plenty of those already. It hasn't helped.

Parading Around

Noon today saw the beginning of the however many year’s annual Point Roberts’ Fourth of July Parade. The sky was blue, the air was plenty warm enough, and a goodly crowd of people were settled on their portable chairs and the curbs and sidewalks over the maybe 5-block parade route (up Gulf Road and then right on Tyee to APA Road). Many kids mushing about, in eager anticipation of the candy that will be flung toward them by the parade participants. Their eagerness for that candy makes it seem as if this was the only day of the year that they were allowed to have candy, although we know that is not so.

The parade always begins with the Vancouver RCMP motorcycle drill team. But this year, it didn’t. The Chamber of Commerce, which sponsors the parade, has had the misfortune to misplace virtually all its members in recent months, making the parade and accompanying beach festivities something of a hard go. As a result, the lone remaining member cancelled the beach festivities and did the best possible with getting the parade to happen. So, it was a disappointment, but Heather is to be much praised for getting it to happen at all, I think. No parade would have been a real disappointment. Another thing to work on for next, year, I guess.

So, no RCMP carrying ons, no stilt walker, no music of any kind, no white dog parade, no decorated horses and riders. But, there were other things: the Fire Department with its treasured array of vehicles; bikers from the Red Hat group with umbrellas; a truly funny cadre of imprecision bicycle drill team members, in various and uncoordinated costumes; a tiny, tiny horse walked along by one of my quilting students who is, herself, not very tall; a man walking with a small sign opposing the war (we cheered him quite a bit to, I think, the consternation of our parade watching neighbors); a number of vintage cars from different vintages, with local people known to be local people riding, waving, throwing candy. The Shriners came down from Canada with their truck, but without either their organ music or their tiny cars or bikes, so we had a Canadian flag there, too. A few floats from the local businesses, throwing more candy, sporting more or fewer flags. Pictures here.

It was all right and an adequate celebratory parade. By comparison with other years, less. But that’s going to be true half the time, anyway. Thanks, Heather; and thanks to all the people who walked and rode and decorated. You made sure we had a Fourth of July Parade to remember in 2008. So much better than remembering 2008 as, well, the year we didn’t have a parade.

Cloth of the World

I’m not sure whether it’s an ordinary stage in late life, or the stage of finally facing up to all the stuff one has gathered up over the years, but whichever, I’ve gotten to that stage. For you, it may be shoes or clothes, but for me, it’s fabric for quilts. For years, I’ve been buying more than I needed, because I eventually would need it. But at this point, with about 10-15 average years left to me, there’s no chance I will ever use this all up. So, I’ve sort of decided to work on using it all up.

Part of that work has been roughly to assess what’s around. In that search, I came upon a nice group of relatively small amounts (less than a half-yard each) of ethnic fabrics, primarily from Africa, Indonesia, and India. The reason they’re in a drawer together is that they don’t blend well with American fabrics, but they do very nicely with each other. I took them all out, cut them up into pieces that would work in a traditional pattern called ‘square in a square,’ and when i had about 250 of them, I turned it all into a queen-sized quilt top. Now it has to be quilted, but because I am primarily a hand quilter of large quilts, that will take some time and, in any case, that is evening work.

So, in the daytime, I took all the pieces left over and sewed them together more or less randomly and finished up a second, though much smaller quilt, a nice size for putting over your lap on a cool fall day. Looking around, a month later, of course, I see no sign that anything has been used up, but I suppose one day I will look around and it will all be gone. That’s hope not a plan, I’m pretty sure, but I like to pretend it’s a plan.

What struck me about all these beautiful ethnic, hand-made fabrics (printed, painted, batiked, whatever, all show the sign of somebody’s hand) is that they represent something we no longer really have in the U.S.—hand-made fabrics that arise from local design traditions. I thought about calling this quilt ‘Third World Beauties,’ but it seemed somehow less than complimentary to refer to these countries' and their peoples’ work as ‘third world.’ Not like wonderful us in the first world. Well, it’s true, of course, these people are different. They know how to make marks of beauty on cloth and most of us in the West haven’t a clue how it’s done and certainly don’t have any local traditions to help us along in the process, nor, of course, any particular desire to do such laborious, time-consuming work even if we did know how.

U.S. fabric is beautifully designed, but it’s designed in the ‘modern’ way that leaves no room for the designer to leave her touch. The designer was a long way away from the American fabric that I use; American fabric is machine-made all the way. And it looks like it. Yards and yards of it pour out of a giant machine, every yard exactly like every other yard. The ethnic fabrics, not so much. They are strangely irregular, their designs surprising and beautifully irregular, simpler in a very compelling way that actually makes them more complex, whereas U.S. fabrics just appear complicated.

Some American quilters are reaching out to the spirit represented by these 'Third World' artisans, these artists, though, and are increasingly making quilts whose every piece of fabric has been designed and colored—painted, dyed, stamped, written upon, all the methods by which you can get marks and color on cloth—by their own hand. We would never think to call their work ‘ethnic’ because it does not come out of any cultural base, any ethnos, I guess. So we call it art, instead. But would we call their quilts ‘First World Beauties’?

Partners, Please

Back in Point Roberts, I was suitably impressed by the speed with which we were hurried through the border station. It was almost as if they had finally decided that having a Nexus pass actually makes you a ‘trusted traveler,’ as they say in all their published materials, rather than just someone called a 'trusted traveler'; trusted enough to get to go through without a lot of questions about why you are here, e.g. ‘I live here,’ the routine answer. Not only was it fast but the border agent, one of several known for less than stellar cheerfulness, said ‘You’re welcome,’ when I offered my routine ‘Thank You,’ as he told us to go on through. I am forced to conclude that they finally hired some higher quality communication-education programs for them.

And then on to a newspaper filled with events of the past month that we didn’t much know about because you can’t know about them until the newspaper comes out on the first of the month and tells you about them. One other newspaper event also happened. The Bellingham Herald, which last month featured a very critical article about Point Roberts, an article that occasioned about thirty people to write very unkind comments in the on-line edition, turned out an extraordinarily welcome editorial on the topic of Point Roberts. (I wrote about that article on May 26, 'Volunteer Rules.')

‘Give them a break,’ was the essence of the editorial, titled ‘Pay attention to frustrated Point Roberts residents.’ (May 31, Bellingham Herald, B3). My favorite sentence is ‘Because of its unique geographic position. . . the Point has scores of unique problems and conditions.” Absolutely: that is exactly the point about the Point that, I think, we would like the government to understand. The problems are unique, and whether we get standard solutions or no solutions because the problem is unique is irrelevant because both make us fairly crazy.

At the moment, the recycling issue is boiling over again because the county is recommending that our trash collector (private) be decertified/lose his trash collecting license, because he can’t offer curb-side recycling. If he and his business go away, there won't be any trash or recycle collections, let alone trash and recycling handled exactly the way that some legislative entity thinks it should be done everywhere in the state. There aren't likely to be a line of people anxious to collect the trash and recycling of approximately 17% of the local households. We need to hang on to what we've got.

Listen up, Whatcom County! I think it’s important to admit, to make absolutely clear that we understand one thing: our problems aren’t more special than any other community’s problems; it is just that solutions that work most places probably won’t work here. Here’s the chance for you all to demonstrate your creativity, to demonstrate that government can work, can be responsive to local issues. And here’s a chance for the local residents to demonstrate their creativity, as well, by understanding that the standard response to slow government won’t work here either. Threats, whines, generalized complaints: we need something better, more imaginative than that kind of stuff. The County has to work on their end, but we need to work on ours, too.

Also, Whatcom County: Thanks for the financial support in purchasing Lily Point.

Patriotism Week, On and On!

Today, July 1, is Canada Day in Canada; but last week, on June 24, it was also Canada Day in Canada. That’s the day that Quebecers and perhaps Francophones more generally celebrate Canada Day by celebrating Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day (John the Baptist), and also for those of a mind, by celebrating the summer solstice a few days earlier, just to be genuinely ecumenical, I guess, according to the Canadian Heritage homepage .

The Globe and Mail is celebrating Canada Day today on its front pages by noting that the the B.C. government has increased gas taxes by 2.34 cents as of today, bringing the local prices to $1.52/liter (which is to say over $6 for four liters which is a little more than a U.S. gallon). It is also pointing out that Prime Minister Steven Harper once again apologized to the First Nations people for having forced all their children to go to residential schools, where they were very badly treated, in the early 20th century. The idea was that by separating them from their parents and putting them in government-run and religious-run residential schools, it would be possible to integrate them into Canadian society more effectively. I suppose it might have worked but there was a substantial amount of physical and sexual abuse, which is bound to ruin a lot of hopes. So, this past month, Prime Minister Harper issued a formal apology, and today he did a little more of it.

I’m not sure this is what is meant by Canadian patriotism, but it is consistent with the country’s sense of responsibility about taxing gas to make the price of gas reflect its real costs to the society, and about trying to do right—albeit often ineffectively or downright badly--by the people they displaced when the Canadians decided it was their own country and not that of the First Nations, and about accommodating its multicultural realities, even if it means including the Wiccans.

By Friday, of course, we will be moving on to U.S. patriotism. Although actually we seem to have our heads full of it already with General Wesley Clark’s scandalous suggestion that having been shot down in a plane and becoming a prisoner of war was not a particular qualification for being president. Was he talking about John McCain? Well I guess so. And did anybody ever think that having been a prisoner of war meant you’d be a good U.S. president? These days, it’s hard to imagine what would qualify you to be president, other than being related to some other president. I wonder what Amy Carter is doing? Somebody ought to stuff a sock in cable TV if this nonsense about John McCain’s patriotism being questioned by Wesley Clark is going to keep being repeated.

I hope that by Friday, we might be able to remember that of all the freedoms that we are celebrating on July 4th, the first of them is Freedom of Speech. Wes Clark can say what he wants, but if he is to be criticized for it, then it ought to be for what he actually did say, rather than for what the Fox and CNN hysterics would like him to have said in order to justify their ‘oh my god, the sky is falling’ performances. Maybe Fox people think that being a prisoner of war is a TERRIFIC qualification for being the president of the U.S. They are surely free to say so, but, of course, we would all laugh at them if they did. That idea is just silly. On the other hand, being a prisoner of war who endured torture might be the perfect qualification for a presidential candidate.